My favourite TV show: Starsky & Hutch

For a boy stranded in a Suffolk village, David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser tearing around in a Gran Torino catching bad dudes was perfect escapism – and the source of some important lessons about friendship, girls and denim

Once upon a very long time ago, a little boy who lived in a sleepy little village in Suffolk discovered Starsky & Hutch. It was nothing like anything else he had ever come across on television before (to be fair, Blue Peter was pretty much all he'd been allowed to watch up to that point, and he was then only allowed to watch S&H because his mum thought Paul Michael Glaser was fit). It was about a world that was totally different to the one he knew. A more exciting and glamorous world. The boy was me, you may have guessed.

For anyone under about 45, Starsky & Hutch was a US cop show in the second half of the 1970s, starring Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul, dark and blond respectively, who wore flared jeans and drove a Ford Gran Torino around the fictional Bay City, California, catching bad dudes. They had an informant, a link to the underworld, a jive-talking badass good guy named Huggy Bear, played by Antonio Fargas. Huggy was handy for picking up west coast street slang from – essential to credibility in rural East Anglia at the time.

I've just watched a random episode – The Omaha Tiger from series one (it all went downhill a bit after series two) – about a series of suspicious deaths at a wrestling club. It's definitely still watchable – camper than I remember, a little hammy, not so complex or thought-provoking, but smartly written and funny. It's not The Wire, certainly.

But this isn't about the best TV; it's about favourite TV, personally significant TV, and Starsky & Hutch meant a lot to me.

There was no one like Starsky or Hutch in Stoke-by-Nayland. There certainly wasn't anyone as cool as Huggy Bear. The cars didn't go round corners like that, leaning over, tyres squealing, often with a little funky 70s horns-and-percussion accompaniment for added drama. Nor was there a red Gran Torino with a white flash down the side in the village. Except that my dad's Escort became one, and we did go round corners like that, in my head.

Starsky & Hutch introduced me to many good things – west coast America, cars, impossibly beautiful girls, leather, denim. The 1970s, too, when our village hadn't really got there yet. We'd just moved from London, and I don't think I'd forgiven my parents – I never really felt I belonged in the country. S&H provided an urban escape. Plus there were guns, violence, criminals, and a lot of chases and crashes. It was exciting and a bit bad – and I liked that, too, of course.

But it was also about friendship, a sort of male friendship that I'd never come across. Jokey on the surface but genuine underneath – brotherly, almost. They were proper partners, looking out for each other, sharing everything – thoughts and feelings, even girls.

And it was touching – literally. One would always put an arm around the other, or punch him playfully on the shoulder. That's not how my dad was with his friends. To be honest it's not how I am with mine. Nor have I ever had a brown leather jacket with a furry collar, like Starsky's. Maybe I've still got some catching up to do.

For those of us who were teenagers when Ricky Gervais' sitcom arrived, The Office was more than just a great comedy – David Brent and his colleagues formed the basis for the way we relate to each other